The Fourteen Stairs I Stopped Being Able to Climb

I taught Grade 6 for thirty-one years in a school on the East Rand, and for most of my marriage I believed a person was only as settled as the size of the home they kept. We bought a face-brick house in Fourways in 1989, four bedrooms, a long sloping garden, a double garage that my husband filled with tools he used maybe twice a year. We raised two children in it. I planted a jacaranda near the gate the week my daughter was born, and I used to stand at the kitchen window and watch it drop its purple mess all over the paving every October and feel something close to pride.

Then the children left. Then my husband, Derek, died on a Tuesday in his sleep three winters ago, and the house got very large, very quickly.

The stairs told me first

It was not the grief that made me think about moving. Grief I could manage. It was the stairs.

There were fourteen of them between the lounge and the bedrooms, and for years I never counted them because why would you count something your body does without asking. Then one evening I carried a basket of washing up and had to stop on the ninth step to let my knee settle, and I stood there holding the banister like a woman much older than I felt, and I counted the rest on the way up. Fourteen. I counted them every day after that. It became a small private humiliation.

The garden was worse. Derek had done the garden. I had always just enjoyed it. After he was gone I paid a man named Simon to come on Thursdays, but a half-acre of Highveld garden is not a Thursday problem, it is a daily argument, and the garden was winning. The pool went green. The borders he had kept so neat went to seed. I would look out of that same kitchen window at the jacaranda and instead of pride I felt a kind of debt I could not pay.

My son phoned from a time zone I can never remember

My son, Marcus, lives in Melbourne. He phones on Sunday mornings his time, which is some ungodly hour of mine, and one Sunday I must have sounded more tired than usual because he went quiet and then said, Ma, why are you still in that house.

I gave him the answer I always gave. Because it is our house. Because your sister got married in that garden. Because where would I even go.

He did not argue. He is cleverer than that. Instead, the following week he sent me an email with a link in it, and the subject line just said, Just look, you do not have to want it. It was a page of apartments for sale in Sandton, and I remember being almost offended, because Sandton in my mind was for young people in a hurry, for the kind of person who buys coffee that costs more than my first week's teaching salary. I closed the laptop. But I did not delete the email.

The afternoon I actually went to look

A month later my friend Hester, who has buried a husband of her own and is therefore allowed to say things to me that nobody else is, told me I was behaving like a woman guarding a museum. She said, you are not honouring Derek by staying, you are just keeping the stairs.

So on a Wednesday we drove in. I had told myself I was only going to humour Marcus and then phone him smugly and say I had tried. We parked, and a polite young woman showed us around, and I was braced to dislike all of it.

I did not dislike it. That was the problem.

The thing that undid me was not the finishes or the view, though the view was something, the whole northern sprawl laid out like a circuit board at dusk. It was the lift. There was a lift. I stood in it and realised that whatever my knees decided to do over the next twenty years, I would still be able to get to my own front door. I had not understood until that moment how much of my days had become a quiet negotiation with fourteen stairs.

Hester looked at me in that lift and said nothing, which from Hester is a whole speech.

What I did not expect to feel

We looked at a few places that week. Some of the Sandton apartments were too slick for me, all glass and no corners, the sort of place you cannot imagine a person crying or burning toast in. But I kept coming back to the idea itself, the lightness of it. For thirty-four years my worth had been measured in square metres and I had never questioned the sum. Now I was standing in rooms a quarter the size of my Fourways lounge and feeling something I can only describe as relief, and relief felt disloyal, and the disloyalty is the part nobody warns you about.

I went home and sat in Derek's study and asked him out loud what he thought, which I do not usually admit to doing. The jacaranda was bare that week. The pool was still green. The answer, if an empty room can give you one, was obvious. He had spent his last years tired from a garden. He would not have wanted me to spend mine the same way.

The practical part, which is less romantic

I will be honest, I am a teacher and I do not make decisions on feelings alone. I made lists. I worked out what the Fourways house would fetch and what the new place would cost and what was left, and the arithmetic was kinder than I feared. I spoke to an estate agent, a sensible woman who did not flatter me. I looked at everything from the little studios to the larger Hyde Park apartments that were frankly beyond what one widow needs, and I settled on something in between, a two-bedroom so my grandchildren have somewhere to sleep when Marcus finally brings them up.

The move itself was brutal in the way all moves are. I gave away most of the tools. I kept Derek's good spirit level for no reason I can defend. The jacaranda I could not take, of course, and that was the hardest goodbye of the whole business, harder than the stairs, harder than the kitchen window. I stood under it one last time and told it that it had done well.

The first morning

I have been here four months now. The first morning I woke up disoriented, as you do, and then I heard the city making its early sounds and I made coffee in a kitchen where I can touch two walls at once, and I carried the cup to the window. The view is not a garden. It is traffic and towers and a sky doing its usual Highveld show-off thing.

But I did not count anything on the way to the window. That is the whole of it, really. I moved through my own home without counting the cost of moving through it. Hester phoned to ask how I was settling, and I told her the truth, which is that I miss the jacaranda and I do not miss the stairs, and that a person can hold both of those at once and still be, for the first time in three years, something like at ease.

Marcus phoned on his Sunday. He did not say I told you so, which I appreciated. He just said, you sound different, Ma. I am, I said. I am about fourteen steps lighter.